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Nielsen's online television meter won't be useful until 2011

This week, Nielsen announced its new "Internet Meter" will be available by the end of the year. But it won't actually be useful until 2011. And the cable companies' plans for TV Everywhere are likely to be put off until 2014. While television companies are talking a lot about putting their premium content online, it could be awhile before this becomes serious business.

Nielsen has long been the leader in television measurement, but networks and advertisers have problems with the way the company collects its data offline. Online their is no set standard to gauge viewership. While companies like comScore, Compete and Quantcast all have online measurement products, networks and advertisers question their methods.

Without an industry standard, companies can cherry pick the numbers that most benefit their purposes. Web
video purveyors like to use measurements that increase their
audience size (Hulu recently dumped Nielsen numbers for comScore because they estimated a larger audience size. Advertisers prefer measures that make the ads cheaper.

Nielsen has the advantage of impartiality and scale over some of the competion getting into the measurement field and says its "Internet Meter" software will be deployed by the end of 2009 to a test group of households. But full implementation the company's online panel of over 230,000 individuals won't happen until 2011.

Meanwhile, both networks and advertisers are hesitant to jump online with both feet until they have a better picture of the online audience.

If they can prove that
viewers are watching online, they can charge decent rates for
advertising. But the viewership numbers differ.

While advertising online might not bring in as much revenue at the
moment, there are features that make it more beneficials to video
creators. For starters, the ads cannot be skipped, meaning that online
viewers have to sit through an entire ad before or while viewing video
content.

But networks have a reason to be hesitant. One exec tells ReadWriteWeb:

"We're not like cable, which has a second revenue stream from subscribers. We need to amortize these very expensive shows."

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